


games of skill; games of chance

by katsidhe



Series: episode codas [10]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s14e17 Game Night, Gen, Guilt, Head Injury, Hurt Sam Winchester, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sam Winchester Has Mental Health Issues, Season/Series 14
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:33:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23971612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katsidhe/pseuds/katsidhe
Summary: Sam, and a head injury, and a car ride: one vessel considers another.14.17 coda.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Nick & Sam Winchester
Series: episode codas [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/942996
Comments: 21
Kudos: 123





	games of skill; games of chance

**Author's Note:**

> **a wild s14 fic appears**

“You’re still looking green around the gills,” Dean tells him.

“I feel okay now,” says Sam. He is still nauseous, but it’s fading. Jack did a good job pasting his skull back together. Nick’s dead. Lucifer’s dead. Sam should be dead but, as usual, isn’t.

“We should have just ganked the guy,” Dean says. Dean is angry, of course he is. Sam doesn’t begrudge him. Sam is probably angry himself.

When Sam broke it to Dean, that Nick had survived and they’d been getting him back on his feet, Dean had told him that it wasn’t his responsibility. _You don’t have to martyr yourself, Sam_ , he’d said, _it doesn’t have to be you taking care of him,_ like Sam was making a sacrifice. But Sam hadn’t been. He really, really hadn’t been.

In fact, Sam’s pretty sure he was being fundamentally selfish.

Cas would have taken it on, if Sam had asked; Sam knows. Same with Mom. But Sam had been the one to bring Nick back, so Sam volunteered. He even told himself it was to spare the others. To spare Cas, who had spent months possessed; to spare Mom, who’d spent an uncertain amount of time in that other world one-on-one with Lucifer.

(When Sam had asked, vaguely, she’d been noncommittal with the details, said, oh, you know. Said, it wasn’t that bad, and hadn’t been long anyway. She’d smiled the way she often smiled, without her eyes, in a way which meant nothing at all.)

But he knows now it hadn’t been because of them, not really. Patching Nick up was—it felt good, like holding his breath and pressing on a bruise.

Dean deserves to enjoy an I-told-you-so, at this point.

* * *

_The noise in his head is loud and long, strident, persistent, splitting him open. Sam tries to wedge himself upright on the wheel, lying across the horn: the noise is his lifeline._

_Saving Nick’s life in that church was still the right thing to do, Sam knows that. He’d just about collapsed from the shock when Nick had tried to sit up, then crumbled back down, unconscious; but Nick so obviously wasn’t Lucifer. Not then, and not today either—not even when he’d been singing, goading Sam like a toddler, using familiar lines—there wasn’t ever really a moment that Sam got them mixed up. He’s sure it’s actually easier for him to see the difference than it was for Mary and Dean; even Cas, for some reason._

_But everything that came after—the warning signs, of which there had assuredly been more than one; the mood swings, the harsh gestures and words. The obsession. Sam didn’t miss the signs. He was simply desperate not to see them. Desperate to believe that someone as indelibly ruined as Nick would manage to pull himself up out of that hole._

_But he was wrong. He’d let himself think... it’s getting harder to think. He leans more heavily on the horn. The sound fractures his skull._

* * *

“So… what happened, how’d he get the drop on you?” Dean’s asking like he doesn’t actually want to poke at it, but he’s compelled to say something anyway.

Sam knows the feeling. The oppressive quiet is somehow too much like the drive up, with Nick in the backseat—even though Nick was anything but quiet; loud but benign, hallucination made solid. Intangible, until he wasn’t, until his human flesh crashed into Sam’s.

It was an odd slip in time, listening to that harmless off-key singing in the dead silence. It was funhouse-mirror strange to glance out of the corner of his eye and see that somehow Dean was grimacing at the off-color taunts—for a second, it was as if Dean could hear into Sam’s mind, or else that he’d taken up residence there too. 

”I don’t know,” says Sam, several seconds too late. It’s not really a lie. It was stupid to think all that was behind him, and he’s not sure why he did it, why he assumed he could handle Nick in a fight.

Dean makes a noncommittal sound.

They drive in silence (actual silence, no sound in Sam’s head) for a few more minutes.

* * *

_The car door rattles. Sam startles upright and falls off the horn; the noise in his head slackens._

_“Dean,” says Sam. It’s Dean. Dean’s cursing, fumbling with the keys. Sam should help him. He fumbles for the handle, tries—_

_The door’s open. “Sam!”_

_“Nnngh,” he tries. He can’t make the words come out. “S’gone. He.”_

_“Sammy—you and your thick fucking head, come on, come on, big guy, you’re fine—”_

_“Lucifer,” Sam gasps. That one’s easier to get out._

_“Not Lucifer,” says Dean, “Nick cold-cocked you good, but you’re fine, okay?”_

_“No,” says Sam, or he thinks he does. “Help.” Help, help, help. He’s being yanked out of the car, pulled out bodily. He struggles but not for long, the light cuts through his eyes, too sharp._

_Dean’s pushed his arm under Sam’s, gripping Sam’s ribs. Sam blinks stupidly at the ground. He buckles forward and throws up, retching emptily onto the pavement._

* * *

“So, the blood I get, but where’d Nick get the grace? Is that something we need to be worried about now, secret fuckin’—horcruxes or whatever?”

Sam considers this briefly, with faint horror—thinks about vials of Lucifer stashed in his vaults like little phylacteries, contingency plans waiting for the wrong tripwire to spring. “I don’t think so,” he says. The possibility of his death hadn’t seemed to hit home for Lucifer even in the moment he was stabbed. “Nick must have extracted it himself.”

“ _Extracted?_ ”

Sam suddenly remembers that Dean hadn’t been around when he and Cas had tried to get out Gadreel’s grace, for that spell. “Yeah. Remember Gadreel?” 

Dean glances sharply at him, then looks away. “Right. Yeah, I remember now.”

They drive on in uncomfortable silence.

Dean rubs the back of his neck. “So. So, when Michael went through my psychic maintenance pipes—he left behind some grace, huh?”

“Probably,” Sam says. “That’s probably part of how he got back in.” He glances sideways at Dean, trying to gauge his expression. “I’m sorry,” he offers. It’s paltry next to the nausea of the realization, he knows, but he can’t bring himself to say anything else. Michael’s dead now. Lucifer, Nick, Gadreel—all dead now.

* * *

_Dean says something. He’s shouting. There are hands in Sam’s hair, damp hot fabric pressing hard against his temple. The world does a dizzy loop and then he’s staring at the sky._

_The air hurts, the gravel prickles on his skin like knives, he’s too stiff to move away. He’s going blind. Where did Lucifer go?_

_“The Empty,” says Dean. His face is blurry and worried, hovering._

_“Lucifer, Lucifer’s, he’s gonna—”_

_Dean pinches him hard on the shoulder, Sam flinches away. “You seeing things? Hey. Stay with me, it’s just us. Okay. Donatello!”_

_Dean’s hands are a heavy, grounding weight. The world tilts on a nauseous axis._

* * *

“Wish I’d just let you kill him,” muses Dean, after another long minute.

“No, man, you were right,” says Sam. “I was out of line.” He’s looking out the window, at the dirty snow, broken through with patches of brown grass and scrub oak.

“You couldn’t have known,” insists Dean, apparently intent on easing Sam’s guilt.

Sam scoffs. Dean shouldn’t bother.

“Cmon,” Dean says, focusing in on his goal now, a dog with a bone, “you couldn’t have. How could you have guessed, huh? Everyone else on the planet, it takes two seconds of Lucifer’s smart mouth before they wanna shoot him in the face just so he shuts up. Who’d have guessed Nick’d be the one dick in existence to actually like the guy?”

Sam gives him a sharp glance. Shrugs. “He’s not the only one who does.”

“…What?” Dean stares at him.

Sam raises an eyebrow. “Most of Hell? Plus a fair chunk of Heaven, plus who knows how many sects of human followers.”

“Oh.”

Dean’s still looking at him like he expected something else. It coils uneasy in Sam’s stomach.

“I really should have—figured, though,” says Sam, finally.

It’s a too-long, too-quiet drive, without anyone in the backseat.

* * *

_It’s a slow-moving nightmare, this disconnect between his head and his mouth. The only thing preserved is the urgency, awful and bloody. But he can’t marshal it, can’t connect it, can’t remember how—he blinks dumbly at Dean, at the icy sky. “Nick’s getting him back, blood, grace, s’a ritual.”_

_Dean freezes. His hands go still. “Fuck. Shit, dammit—_ now _? Where’d he go?”_

_“Dunno. He’s got—his grace—Jack’s blood—” The panic has him fighting, batting weakly against Dean’s tight grip. He can’t think through it, a molasses-thick dream where all he can do is writhe and struggle against the syrupy weight pinning him down, try vainly to push away the slimy stifling horror in time._

_“Sam—focus, okay. Shit. Okay. We can handle—we’re on top of this—I’ll call—”_

_Dean knows._

_Sam’s warned him._

_He’s done it—Dean and Cas and Jack and Mom will—Sam lets his eyes slip closed, just for a second._

* * *

How long had Sam let Nick wander, unfettered, with a piece of Lucifer nestled in his soul? How well did Nick know Sam, how much had he seen? How well did he know _Dean_? How much did Sam let his stupid impulse to—to fix someone Lucifer broke, blind him to basic safety precautions?

And now that the damage is done, as always, Sam has the time and the hindsight to look back and see all the cracks in his intentions, the places where he’d thought his motives were pure and his actions were just, where he’d allowed self-delusion and selfish need to drive him onwards without caring about the fallout.

It’s that fucked up self-righteous part of himself, that need to be _right_ , that need for something to _go_ right, that lets him think that just because he has a worthy goal, he’s excusable.

It’s the reason for the near miss today. It’s the reason nearly everyone they saved from that other world is now dead, buried with too little ceremony in a mass grave in Kansas, far, far from their home. It’s the reason for a whole hell of a lot more, if Sam wants to go back a year or several.

He doesn’t know why he keeps wanting things like this for himself. The shame should be whittled to an unbreakable point by now, a mechanism to keep Sam from fucking things up irretrievably; and yet he keeps pushing through it anyway, and the blood keeps building up on his hands.

Nick flinching from his hands, glancing up at Sam from hooded eyes—how long did it take? How many of those times that Nick stared at him had been with twisted, insane jealousy and not deep unease, as Sam had assumed?

Sam noticed him looking; he couldn’t not. Sam was the one taking care of him, after all: feeding him, bandaging his wound, bringing him news and human contact that Nick had seemed to grasp at like a man drowning, his understandable awkwardness aside.

Sam asked after his nightmares. Sam asked him carefully if he remembered anything useful about Michael. Sam stitched together his flesh. Sam kept tabs on Nick, watching his human movements and his human posture. Nick ate, Nick slept, Nick hissed in pain under Sam’s hands, and Sam tried to keep his careful thrill quiet—he curled his toes and licked his lips and slowed his breathing.

 _Must be weird for you, helping me_ , Nick had said.

And it had been weird, Sam agreed. Just, not in any way that was quantifiable or straightforward. Being around him was like being suspended over knives, tense and perfect. Safe and unsafe. Proof that this wasn’t ten years ago, or seven, that Sam could inhabit his fear and come out unscathed and breathing hard and tingling—that Sam could shove all his issues into one box with one face, minimize and control whatever the world threw at him, lose sleep and come out the stronger for it.

Sam looked forward to visiting Nick, every time, with an anticipatory adrenaline like being ratcheted up the lift hill on a rollercoaster, waiting for that safe, sickening drop. Waiting to come out sane.

He’s a junkie, through and through—can he complain that it turned out the ride wasn’t up to code, after all, when he’s the one who tore through all the caution tape, who hotwired the car and ignored the brakes?

* * *

_Everything’s dim and red like this. His pulse thunders sick and loud. No matter how many times Sam’s died, he can never shake the animal terror. There’s a point where mortal instinct takes over; the shift from pain-without-purpose to soul suffocation, the body’s last-ditch scream._

_It’s okay, though. He’s done it._

_“Stay with me, now. We’re just gonna play a little game.”_

_It’s happening. His brain’s clawing uselessly at life. It’s the last starbursts of agony._

Not so perfect now _, Sam thinks. What he did to himself, what he would have done to himself. How many rocks, the ways he would have smashed his own bones apart if it would have changed a single thing._

_“Just count with me,” Dean says._

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday, Sam Winchester!
> 
> congratulations on your 37th being entirely uneventful.


End file.
